Manchester United Women captain Maya Le Tissier sat down with The Telegraph to discuss the issue of English players struggling to get opportunities in the league.
Le Tissier joined Manchester United in 2022 and has been voted into the WSL Team of the Season three times, including last season.
Incredibly, she has also played three consecutive seasons without missing a match. Predictably, she also started in Friday night’s loss to London City Lionesses.
Her incredible injury record
When asked to comment on why she feels she has such an incredible fitness record, she explained, “when I was younger, I trained like a psycho. Honestly, I was training constantly – at school, lunchtime, after school.
Because I was living back home, I felt like I was missing out on a lot when I saw all my England team-mates training over here. I would just beast myself. I don’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.”
Le Tissier did admit that there was also an element of luck in her lack of injuries, in that she hasn’t had to recover from a serious injury before or pick up niggles as a consequence.
Tough for youngsters
Le Tissier started playing regularly at just 16 years old at Brighton at the start of her career, but she is aware of how tough it is for young players to be given opportunities these days to feature regularly.
She explained, “you need the manager to trust you. You need to be able to perform. Because I played boys’ football, I was already physically there. That wasn’t really a question, it was just the technical aspect. The older players would treat you as a kid or as one of the older players and give you help and sometimes shout at you on the pitch; that’s what you need. You need to have those high standards. But I think I was very lucky having Hope Powell, she had a lot of discipline and everyone just did what she said.”
She did sympathise with youngsters these days and stated, “I understand it’s very difficult for them, especially in this situation right now, it’s really challenging for them. It’s also hard for us [senior players] to try to manage that and keep standards really high.”
Le Tissier admitted that she perhaps could do a better job as a senior player now, guiding younger ones and remembering where she came from.
The defender also claimed that the fact the WSL is becoming more and more international is making it harder for young English girls coming through.
The captain added, “you don’t see that many young English players coming through, which is not good. I think the league and the FA are doing something about that to try to help. We need to try to make them feel comfortable. I think that’s the main thing; when you feel relaxed you play your best football and when you’re stressed you don’t.”
Explaining what else can be done, she claimed, “I just think that you need to play football and I think that when you’re younger, you need to go away and play at a high level.”
She also stated that spending copious amounts of time on the bench just isn’t that helpful and, at the end of the day, “you need to get straight into football and play games.
 I did that when I was younger.”
Featured image Jan Kruger via Getty Images
